Although sociomaterial approaches have recently received attention in educational sciences, the majority of educational studies still follow representational assumptions which accounts for clear distinctions between meaning-matter, and subject-object in research (Fenwick, Edwards, & Sawchuk, 2011). Sociomaterial approaches offer a different approach to the realm of research that attends to human and non-human actors symmetrically and through the relations these actors establish.
This paper contributes to the expansion of sociomaterial ethnographies, as they offer the researchers with guidelines for the analysis of data in different educational fields, especially in digitally saturated settings. Educational settings are increasingly integrated with various digital mediations, namely the deployment of digital devices and online platforms at schools. Digital devices and the new corresponding technologies complicate the setting under investigation. Only a small number of studies have specifically focused on the sociomateriality of digitally saturated educational settings and its implications for sociomaterial ethnographies of these settings.
The current study addresses challenges that are introduced when scrutinizing digitally saturated settings in a sociomaterial vein, and more particularly traditional sociomaterial guidelines for observation and analysis of these settings. Additionally, the study offers new pathways to further develop sociomaterial ethnographies of education. It does so by means of an ethnographic observation in one digitally saturated setting, namely at a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) school. In these schools students are asked to bring at least one personal digital device for educational purposes.
One of the general guidelines of sociomaterial approaches is to scrutinize the educational field by assembling and re-assembling the actors and their relations in terms of regions, and networks. The traditional sociomaterial approach accounts for a stable pattern of these networks. For instance, Law(1989) stresses the stability needed for networks to operate, that is, when technological artifacts are introdcued to the setting. This implies that a breakdown in any component threatens the stability of the network.
As opposed to this traditional take, Sorensen (2009) conveys how this assumption falls short in relation to virtual environments. Different components can temporarily disappear or breakdown, but the practice remains stable. “The stability is not created through all the components staying in place”(Sorensen, 2009, p. 64). Rather, the technological process is stable precisely because of its fluidity which allows components to be mobile, and to float in and out. Concurring with Law and Mol (1994), she replaces the metaphor of network with ‘metaphors of regions and fluid spaces’ (Fenwick, 2010, p.16) to account for the sociomaterial description of technological processes.
For Sorensen (2009), a temporary interruption of the components does not interrupt the practice, the fluid patterns of relation allow the practice to go on, and the network to remain stable. However, this take equally implies that the network rejects, avoids or dismisses what (relations) emerge in these breakdowns and how.
This issue can especially be traced when a temporary absence of a component transforms the practice drastically, so much as to either disrupt the practice or drastically change its form. The fluid patterns of relations do not allow to analyze these situations, for they simply focus on the “fluid stability” (Sorensen, 2009). Through a sociomaterial ethnography at a school that implements BYOD model, this paper demonstrates that the metaphor of regions and fluid spaces does not completely describe the relations of these technological processes. This has been analysed through comparing and contrasting several interruptions (lost network connection, computer breakdown, the broadcast of a shocking news, the absence of a teacher) at schools’ routines. The analysis presents how different relations emerge in these situations, and how the fluid patterns of relation can give their ways to plastique patterns of relations.